Twelve short fragments reveal the often abrupt and always confrontational aspect of personal relationships. Played out as television ads, these situations are steeped in an atmosphere where reality remains complacently unattainable.
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"We may not always be aware of it, but the relationship with our material and social environment is governed by social conventions that ease our integration into the world. Patrice Duhamel rethinks the way we interact with reality through a body of work in which staged situations depict characters whose behaviours deviate from the norm. [...] At first glance, the actions and the gestures made by the characters in the videos, as well as their relationships, seem absurd and confused. Upon closer inspection, we see that they expose a vital experiment in which nothing is taken for granted: no object has a pre-determined function and there is no pre-etablished relationship. In this context, relational misfire inevitably occurs."
Centres des arts actuels Skol. «Patrice Duhamel, La vie matérielle», Montreal, (may 2004).
